Baseplane Tools: OpenSocial Wrappers and Add-on Services
Markets of many things have a period of innovation and experimentation 
through normal human trial and error, record response, adjust feedback loops. Over time, certain market standards emerge.
For social networks these market standards are profiles, friends, messages, blogs, pictures, and other custom handlers. OpenSocial has emerged late 2007 and is a great example of where after a period of time, a standard baseplane platform emerges and makes it another stepping stone to a further period of innovation and experimentation through normal human trial and error, record response, adjust feedback loops by combining and allowing a protocol to expose and consume data for OpenSocial. This could help many smaller or quickly developed communities get setup quickly, and it will also create social network giants that own the data. OpenSocial from Google was released after Microsoft signed with Facebook. Google came back with OpenSocial that got lots of attention and respec, also a move for Google to own the information and data standard. Then Facebook got forced to open up the apis to provide almost the same functionality, but no OpenSocial. Sometimes you need toolkits that will help to talk to both systems or many more pluggable ROM generation kits that allow you to integrate into these services such as blogging has the metaweblog apis and do most communication in a RESTful or XMLRPC based standard communication. It has allowed many blogging tools to integrate and help proliferate the platform and the companies involved in constructing it such as Wordpress (Automattic), MoveableType (SixApart), etc. There is great value to having open standards and market standards that allow the platform to flourish.
The baseplane code generation BOM (baseplane object mapper) has a ROM (rapid object mapper) both in development that can map your objects or existing applications to share along the OpenSocial standards (roadmaps and tests coming soon). We have many more ROMs that allow layers to be added to your code generation and custom manipulation of that work that have been built after 12+ years of experience in enterprise development. The great thing is the ROMs are custom, meaning that they follow your coding style and how you want things. None of this dictator like ORM systems, this is the reverse to that. They can integrate with existing code and they are not THE platform, they help you shape one though. More on this as the BOM is dropped.
The good news is more platforms are emerging, the bad news is there is much to learn and become an expert on.
Tags: baseplane, innovation, open social, platforms, social, social networking
